


Regained

by AnonymousVow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: And very traumatized, F/M, Leia is a bit possessive, Twincest, and so is Luke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-04-23 00:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19139827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousVow/pseuds/AnonymousVow
Summary: In the hold of the smuggler's ship, the two of them huddle together. His name is Luke, Luke Skywalker - and something about the name rings in her mind, something that says 'you should know this', and he feels like home.Home, which is Alderaan, which is gone.(Leia finds she can't sleep without Luke. Everyone is just happy she can sleep at all.)





	Regained

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shadowssuitme](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowssuitme/gifts).



> Request: "In the nights after the Battle of Yavin, Leia discovers she doesn't have nightmares if she sleeps in Luke's arms."
> 
> It took me a year to post this because last year was, wow, not that awesome. My apologies! It has been living on my phone for 11 months.

_By the hunger of change and emotion,_  
_By the thirst of unbearable things,  
_ _By despair, the twin-born of devotion_  
  
\- Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Dolores"

 

* * *

 

Everything is better once Leia lays eyes on the blue-eyed boy who pants that he's here to rescue her. The dark screaming pain that lives where Alderaan used to -- not _gone_ , but brightened, lightened, shadows receding as if from the kindling of a white flame, weight shifting as if someone had shoved their shoulder under what she alone had been carrying. After the unending horror of "Alderaan is gone gone _gone_ " it is almost delirious, what his presence does to her. 

 

She finds herself mouthing off to her would-be rescuer, much to her shock - she had thought she would never joke again. 

 

They run and they fight and they flee; events hurtle at them too fast for Leia to truly parse, she just reacts, and it is as if she is watching from a very far distance as this young dark-haired princess of nothing is flung into trash, shoots stormtroopers, swings across gaping chasms. 

 

She is the one who presses a kiss to her blue-eyed boy, though - her choice, her last grasp at human warmth before what might be her plummet to her death. 

 

***

 

Later, in the hold of the smuggler's ship, the two of them huddle together. His name is Luke, Luke Skywalker - and something about the name rings in her mind, something that says 'you should know this', and he feels like _home_. 

 

Home, which is Alderaan, which is gone. 

 

Her entire world is gone. Luke's in nearly the same position, with Ben ( _Kenobi!_ ) and his aunt and uncle dead, and his homestead burned, and that all he knows. 

 

The Empire had torn everything away from him, as it had torn everything away from Leia. Leia is glad that he _understands_ , that someone is the same as her, that of all people it's Luke, and is immediately sorry and guilt-filled for feeling glad. She buries it underneath the mountain of grief. 

 

***

 

Events are still blinding-fast and she still feels a bit divorced from herself. She knows she is angry when Han leaves. She knows she is intent on making the Empire pay. She knows that she must pull the Rebellion together, in this darkest hour. She knows the Death Star is on their trail, and could quite possibly blow up their jungle-moon the way they had blown up beautiful Alderaan. 

 

She knows all this, but it feels so very, very far away from herself. 

 

***

 

The Death Star erupts into a burst of fire, and Leia thinks - very calmly, very quietly - that it looks like Alderaan had, when it ended. 

 

She doesn't sleep that night - no one does. For one thing, the Rebellion has just escaped collective death by the skin of their teeth, through the actions of a just-joined, fresh-off-the-Rim boy with big blue eyes, had struck a resounding blow against the Empire. For another, there is still so much to do. And lastly, she is still not used to Endor's cycle. Her cell on the Death Star had been kept flooded with cold, antiseptic artifical lighting - to keep her off-balance, she knew - and her system is still reeling from that, and the droids, and the hyperspace jumps, and...

 

The next day, she hangs medals on Luke and Han's necks, and the base starts to evacuate. 

 

That night, finally, she goes to sleep. 

 

And awakens the base with her screaming. 

 

***

 

 

They tell her, later, that it had been bad. They tell her Rieekan had wept, watching his orphaned princess - his uncrowned queen - thrash on the bed, her night-shift rucking up to reveal bacta-healed, still-livid scars from the Imperial torture-cells. They tell her that burly Rebel soldiers had tried to hold her down - and failed. 

 

They tell her she had struggled, screaming, until Luke Skywalker ran into the room. 

 

She quiets in his presence and the older ones immediately attribute it to "The Force" - remembering tales of Jedi mindhealers, Jedi Knights soothing traumatized victims, Jedi Masters pulling off miracles where medical science failed. 

 

Leia doesn't know all this until later, but she does know that she awakens in the morning rested, refreshed, and with her head pillowed on Luke's chest.

 

***

 

 

He makes her feel - complete. Full, when she had never known she had hungered. Unalone, in a different way than she has ever felt, in a time she is more alone than ever before. 

 

Alderaan is gone, but she has Luke, and somehow - somehow - it is an equivalent exchange. 

 

She will never tell anyone else this, especially not her fellow Alderaanians. 

 

Luke tells her Biggs Darklighter is dead, and she knows without his telling her that he has lost literally everything now - Ben, Biggs, and the Larses - and that he is as adrift as she is. 

 

She feels a fierce, possessive joy, too fierce to be joyful, too fiery to be anything but joy, that no one exists now who has a greater claim than herself to Luke and his attention.

 

She will never tell anyone else that, either. 

 

***

 

It is an accepted thing, now, that Luke and the princess share a room. Some think of Luke as practically a Jedi, which is to say divorced from human emotion and pledged to the Force, and think of Leia as basking in Holiness - and naught else. Others think of Luke as a dashing hero, bold and handsome and skilled, and that he certainly deserves the princess in his bed.

 

Both are wrong, but the important ones know that Leia merely sleeps in his presence, and can't do so anywhere else. The Rogues joke that it frees up space in their bunkroom - except for Tycho Celchu, who is simply grateful, and thinks of his Commander as the Princess's own Knight. 

 

***

 

They send Luke on a long-term, undercover mission. His skills at hand-to-hand combat and as a pilot, both of which he is preternaturally good at, make him a top pick. The fact that he's desert-born and Rim-born and the mission is on Yakatt, which is both, make him indispensable. 

 

Leia braces herself. It has been more than a standard year since Alderaan. The Rebellion needs him. It is only for a month.

 

The month is hell - not only when she sleeps, which she does in desperate snatches, with white silk crammed in her mouth to muffle her screams and C-3PO standing by to awaken her if she begins to thrash - but when she is awake as well. She is absent-minded, irritable, and increasingly pale. It is not as if they had not been parted before; it is not even as if they spent most of their days together. But still - but still... it is as if part of her is pulling away, straining towards...towards... 

 

"This is not like _before_ , we won't be parted for so long _again_ ," she finds herself muttering, and pauses to wonder at the "again". 

 

Luke staggers back, scorched, wounded, but victorious. R2 has fresh carbon-scoring on his dome-top and the Rebel techs wince when they see the state of Luke's X-wing, but Luke doesn't notice because he's too busy running into Leia's arms, and she realizes he sleeps better with her too, and that he is  _hers_ just as much as she is  _his,_ and the smile on her face - though no one knows and no one will ever know - is the smile of her blood-father triumphant. 

* * *

  _Dost thou dream of what was and no more is,  
_ _The old kingdoms of earth and the kings?  
_ _Dost thou hunger for these things, Dolores,  
_ _For these, in a world of new things?_

\- Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Dolores"

 


End file.
